Best way to spend your time during Bench days in your Company

If you are working in a Service Based IT company you would know that they put you on bench till they get a project in which they can tag you. But sometimes this might take from few days to few months. It can get annoying at times. So in this article, I will be sharing my experience of how I spent and enjoyed my bench days.

How I wish if I could record the emotions that I went through when I first got to hold my offer letter. It gave me greater joy than my final year results. It brought tears of joy to eyes while reading the offer letter again and again.

The feeling of being independent, being responsible earning money by your hard work, all those thoughts were so overwhelming for me. I still so vividly remember my first day in the company and the day on which I got my first salary. We had training for three months after which we were on bench. Our HR said that we will be on bench till we get tagged to any project. In my first company I was on bench for two times, both the time my experience differed a lot. I will describe how I made the best use of each.

Initial Bench Days

After our initial training of three months, we had to wait for few months before we could start working on my first project. We had the ambience of college even during the training as it was a classroom of about 50 freshers. So we never felt that we are in an IT company till we started working. It was mandatory for us to have 9 hours of swipe per day. So we had to come to company daily though we didn't have any projects to work upon. Now how do we spend 45 hours a week on bench and make most of it? During the initial days of bench we just had lots of fun. We went for trekking, exploring the surroundings around us, playing cricket and we spend most of our time in the canteen. This went on for a week but after a week we all started feeling guilty and our conscience started pricking us. We felt that we not being fruitful to the company in any ways yet they are paying us with salary. This guilt started eating us up so we decided that we would not waste our time in any futile activity.

We went to our bench manager and said we wanted to do something fruitful and would not like to waste time. He told us to enrol for training so that our skills would get be upgraded. So we started hunting for training that was available in the portal and enrolled ourselves to the ones that interested us. After training, we had our own leisure time. So by the time we got tagged to the project many of us were already certified in at least one of the technology by the organisation which also boosted our resume.

I got tagged into a project which lasted for few months and it was later bought by another IT company so we were no longer working on that project. So we were on bench again. Now, these bench days were very crucial.

Crucial Bench days.

I was relaxed for the first week of my bench period as in my previous project it had become very hectic working day and night so I had really hoped for a break and it was a much-needed break where I got some good sleep, proper food and did all my favourite activities.

After a week, I had still not got any project but thankfully I had a desk of my own so I didn't have to roam around in the sun. I had a place to go through the emails and browse through pieces of stuff. I had this great desire in my heart to travel abroad. So I started looking for an opportunity where I could travel. That's when I came across this short term course TEFL -(Teaching English as Foreign Language). It was a three weeks course in Bangkok. Once you complete this course you will be able to teach in countries where English is second language. It is also popularly known as TESOL - Teaching English to speakers of other language. I took an interest in that, but I was not sure how genuine that course was or the establishment was. So I investigated more on it and gathered more information about it and found that it was certified one.

So I went ahead and took admission though I didn't know if I would get three weeks approval from my organization. But everything went fine and after eight months I did go to Bangkok and completed my TEFL course. So my wish of travelling abroad was fulfilled. After completing the course I got many offers to teach in Thailand and Philippines.

These bench days were crucial because severe layoff was going on in my organization, everyone was getting fired. So the longer I stayed on bench my risk increased of getting a lay off. But thankfully and by the grace of the almighty, it did not happen. I got tagged into a project after three months. Also, It was during these bench days that I took the decision of taking a short time course which benefited me in every way.

So this was how I spent my Bench days in my organization!

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